The end of the day
Remember the days
When we were close to the edge
And we’ll wonder
How we made it through the night
The end of the day
Remember the way
We stayed so close till the end
We’ll remember it was me and you

I have been listening a lot to the Lighthouse Family again, not for any particular reason beyond the fact that scrolling through my music collection a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled on ‘High’ their song from 1998 and got sucked down the proverbial rabbit hole that is YouTube. A few hours later, I was left with a slew of memories from two seasons of my life, and memory lanes I hadn’t been down in a while.

I first ‘met’ High in the days before I went away to University, when mindless TV was anathema, and TV watching – if huddled around our old Black & White National Panasonic TV with my parents and siblings could be termed ‘watching’ – was restricted to the news; Sunday evenings and Frank Olize’s Newsline being the most memorable of those times. Two adverts from that season of life seem engrained in my memory – the St Moritz one with High as the sound track and that seminal Joy soap one where blokes spilled papers from their briefcases, tripped themselves up and swooned under the influence of the inner beauty unleashed by that soap (didn’t work for me by the way, thanks false advertising!).

Given my restricted TV time, my contact with High was limited to the snippets I picked up from that commercial. It would be a few years later, that I would ‘meet’ the rest of the song. One infernal Benin afternoon, whilst hitching a ride from the University gate to our Faculty in a friend’s beat up Corolla and sandwiched between four other people in the back seat, High came up on his cassette player. My initial reaction was one of disbelief then elation, as though I’d just met a long lost relative. I ended up borrowing the tape that evening, and after I had held on to it for over a month, my friend offered to ‘dub’ a copy for me – that was the only way he was going to get the tape off me in a usable state. Something about the lyrics of the song succinctly captured the season of life I was in – Engineering Maths, over crowded drawing rooms and lecture theatres and the Thursday bête noire that was Engineering Drawing sure felt like a dark December I needed rescuing from.

Much later I would learn about the duo and their Newcastle connections and then go on to ingest all their material I could lay hands on – even Tunde Baiyewu‘s solo material after the split from Paul Tucker. The key ingredients which got me hooked on to their music remain things which I look out for – easy listening, engaging lyrics and the silky smooth vocals. I suspect they’re one of the duos I’d think seriously about buying tickets to go see live, if they ever got back together or went on tour.

Someday, it’ll all be over…

That’s a sentiment I could use remembering in my current season of life…